Yew Jin's Sometimes Blog

A while back some Ministry of Education officials visited Google and were wondering how to revamp the 'A'-level Computer Science syllabus. I think the viewpoint that the software engineers had were that school never taught us software engineering. This article from Joel (of Joel on Software fame) articulates this point nicely:

I have some limited experience with this, having worked with a group of Rose-Hulman students over the course of their final year project. We let them pick their own schedule, and, of course, they put everything off until the last minute and produced something that was incomplete. The typical CS assignment expects students to write the “interesting” part of the code (in the academic sense of the word). The other 90% of the work that it takes to bring code up to the level of “useful, real-world code” is never expected from undergrads, because it’s not “interesting” to fix bugs and deal with real-world conditions, and because most CS faculty have never worked in the real world and have almost no idea what it takes to create software that can survive an encounter with users.